Transfer data manually between two Office 365 accounts

Prepare to roll up your sleeves and block out a chunk of time on your calendar: transferring data between two Office 365 accounts is a manual, complicated, and time-consuming process. This is not an automated or supported process. We’ll get you started.

Caution: There will be down time during the process where email, Lync, and a public website hosted on Office 365 won’t work. Users will get new user names and passwords, and they’ll need to reset up Outlook.

Only transfer data manually using the instructions in this topic if one of the following applies:

You need to change to a plan in a different service family.

Your company name changed, and you decided to create a new subscription and migrate your data because you want to use different initial domain names.

You need to combine multiple subscriptions into one new one.

Important: If you need to change your subscription plan and can use the Switch plans wizard, or if you need to transfer to a new subscription plan in the same subscription family even when the Switch plans wizard doesn’t work, you don’t need to manually transfer your data, and there is no down time.

Tasks

Steps

Purchase the plan you want to move to.

When you sign up, you specify the company name to use in the initial domain names: yourcompany.onmicrosoft.com, yourcompany-public.sharepoint.com, and yourcompany.sharepoint.com. You need to use a different yourcompany name than you did for any existing subscriptions.

Note: It typically takes a minimum of several months after cancelling a subscription to release the initial domain names that use yourcompany from our systems. Even if you plan to save all your data from your old Office 365 subscription, and cancel that subscription, the old yourcompany value is not immediately available for use in a new subscription.

Remove your custom domain from your old Office 365 subscription.

Follow the required steps before you remove a domain to remove the domain name from user email addresses and remove DNS records for email and Lync for the custom domain. If you host your public website on Office 365, you’ll also need to remove the CNAME record that points to it.

Important: After you remove the MX record that routes email to this custom domain, email will stop working until you have added the domain to your new account, set up the new MX record, and set up your users. When you remove the DNS records for Lync, Lync will stop working. And after you remove the CNAME record that points to your public website, it will not be available.

Cancel the subscription for the plan you’re done with by calling Microsoft Support for Office 365.

Verify that your new subscription is working and all data has been transferred.

Go to Admin > Support > Ask for customer support > Call billing and subscription support and select your country or region to find the phone number.

Cancel your old subscription.

Transfer administrative settings between subscriptions

Go to the following pages on each account, and set up the new account based on the old account’s settings.

If you are transferring data from Office 365 to Office 365 Midsize Business or Office 365 Enterprise, the admin pages are structured differently. Watch a Video: Introducing Office 365 Enterprise, and go to the following places to look at admin settings.